The Sikh Geek

I was reading Viral Tarpara’s blog post about Facebook possibly Open Sourcing its code. Viral hoped that they didn’t choose the GPL because it would stop others commercialising derivative works. This is quite a common perception and something not helped by the Free Software Foundation itself. But is this true? Now, only a Judge and a Court of Law can actually make those decisions about the provisions of a License. What we do know is that GPL Software is commercialised and so are derivative works. Linux is an example of GPL Software and which is incorporated with proprietary code such as device drivers and sold on a subscription basis by companies such as Red Hat and Novell. Last time I looked these were fairly commercial organisations. There is a great book entitled “Open Source Licensing” by Lawrence Rosen which looks at these issues from a legal perspective. It is true that the FSF has not wanted the linking of non GPL code with GPL code but as Rosen points out in his book, what matters is the actual terms and conditions which don’t directly preclude this happening and also having this tested in Court and therefore the Precdents that would go with it. Linus Torvalds has been fairly vocal on this and wanting the freedom to incorporate/link non-GPL and GPL code.

The GNU project was started back in 1984 to create a Unix Like Operating System but the kernel was never completed and so the GNU suite of programmes were used with the Linux Kernel and Linux is a trademark owned by Linus Torvalds who has chosen to license the Linux Kernel using the GPL v2. It’s strange that an organisation like the FSF promoting Software Freedom, doesn’t want people to have the freedom to chose the Licenses under which a system/product is put together.